Friday, January 31, 2014

#229 session: progress vs appearance of progress

It's been a bit of a rough week sleepwise, but I think I made good progress regardless. Especially yesterday I noticed very substantially better vision, new depth. It's still morning right now, which means that whatever improvement that I made yesterday is still waiting to reveal itself later in the day.

I've been paying attention to my own subjective experience of improvement vs what my eyes look like. Sometimes there's a mismatch. Sometimes it feels like I'm having a particularly good day, and I'm intercepting a lot of information. Then I'll look at my eye, and I'll notice that it's still a bit misaligned. Then at other times, I'll notice the opposite: sometimes it's very aligned and looking great, but I'll notice nothing in particular in terms of improvement in vision.

I don't take that as something to worry about. Really what I do is I take a mental inventory of how each exercise went, how my double left foot looks, how my eyes appear in the mirror, my own subjective experience, and taking all of those things into account, I judge progress. It's one of the reasons that I find it useful to do several varied vision therapy exercises. It's not just for variety of stimulation, it's also so that I also have several different sources of information telling me where I am in terms of progress. The term that a scientist would use for this is consilience.

Overall, I think the objective measure of progress is more reliable, because subjective measure of success is so relative. Whenever I make sudden improvement, it seems huge, I get excited, and I think to myself 'I'm almost done! Any day now!'. I can't tell you how many times I've done that--how many times I've said to myself 'This week. This is the last week.'.

I would constantly do that because I had no basis for comparison. Every time I had significant perceived progress I would see something new that I had never seen before. Gradually, I'd adapt and then I wouldn't notice that change any longer. Meanwhile, the eye is gradually, slowly aligning itself. Honestly, if I go by that measure--and not by subjective experience--I'd guess I have something like two more months. We'll see.